If there is any good that come out of carrying a laptop everyday (apart from the possibility that if you fall over the laptop will crush you and you can end your misery quite quickly) is probably the fact that one has access to all the academic equipment one needs all the time. Nowadays textbooks are online, notes are online, you can take notes online, e-mails are online... and all of a sudden you find that carrying the 400lb textbook around is now out of date.

Except when the school interweb system, for some reason, decides to malfunction in some way and then you are in miserable level of Cania and you're trying to battle that Mephistopheles of that malfunction. Unfortunately, Mephisto owns you and you get beaten into a pulp.

Which is what happened to me today. I was trying to install a printer client onto my laptop so I don't have to log into the school computer EVERY TIME I want to print; unfortunately adobe decides to crash my spooler and then the damn thing won't even install properly at all, making me believe that this school is an EPIC FAIL (remember that phrase, anybody?) when it comes to tech stuff. Hell, even KCL managed to allow wireless printing from private laptops. I'm not asking them to copy KCL web system - it sucked, and I never had proper reception in my hall residence half the time, and bittorrent was decidedly blocked as if they were terrified that all the students would suddenly pirate Microsoft Office - but come on! I cannot be hassled to go and log in, wait for the client to appear, then find the document, click print, type in password, then wait by the printer, swipe card, type in password again, select job, and then finally wait for the product to come out. I'd rather watch sodium acetate crystals form on top of the arboretum roof (meaning that it will never happen).

So here is my advice, from a lowly undergraduate student, to the Loyola IT department: GET A NEW PRINTING SERVER. For Christ's sake, this school charges a ridiculous amount for the level of education it's giving (which is basically rote memorise, spit out on paper). It still does not have Office 2010 making it necessary for me to carry my laptop around, since 2007 and 2010 are NOT compatible. Furthermore, wireless printing from laptops do not work, for some bizarre reason a few computers have Linux installed with VMWare mounted on it (and on it, inexplicable, is a Windows OS), and it still has Internet Explorer as its default browser which drives me utterly insane. It also has useless crap on it that no one ever uses, while more useful tools like Mathematica are not there (I don't understand this. The extra credit problems in the math department must be submitted with a Mathematica file. I am not going to buy that $500 software just for extra credit. So how does one DO them without Mathematica on the school PCs?). The Lenovo Thinkpads that the school rents out to the students, for some reason, has oversensitive touch pads that make typing a pain in the ass. And to log onto the school network from Windows, you really have to select servers, type in passwords... it's all a confused mess. Evidently Loyola likes macs. Well, I am not a fan of it. There is no OneNote on macs and I can't handle non-right-click Microsoft Word. And forget about "well, if you press the command key on the keyboard"... no, that's not right click. That's just clicking while pressing the command key.

So after all this rant, what am I saying? That technology at all universities suck. Hell, even at MIT it sucks evidently; half the time JB gets kicked off while on-campus, only to come back 30 seconds later apologetically.

That reminds me, I have to study for Genetics.